Posted
by
timothyon Sunday August 14, 2011 @11:40AM
from the on-the-other-side-withholding-them-by-silence dept.

derGoldstein writes "Intel will again offer CPU upgrades through software. In the past, the upgrades gave you HyperThreading and more L3 cache. This time upgrades will actually increase CPU frequency: 'Intel Upgrade Service offers three different upgrades on second generation Core processors: Intel Core i3-2312M processor, Intel Core i3-2102 processor, and Intel Pentium G622 processor.' The page provides benchmarks of the 3 upgrade options."

What about the DRM built-in the CPUs?? you know they have some horrible system in place to support this; otherwise, the upgrades will leak out on the internet and we will get them for free.... just think of the malware that could use such features.

That's pretty much how CPUs have always been.Intel or AMD makes a wide array of processors, but mostly, you're just buying variations on the top processor for each model.The CPU gets tested and underperforming chips get tagged as low or mid range.After that, production quotas and demand get filled by software/hardware locking fully functional top end chips.

Yes, but they don't generally charge for an upgrade, and if you break it in the process of overclocking what they sold, they don't support it.

This is a new low as they're selling you a chip, a chip that they're guaranteeing will work at the higher clockspeed, but won't unlock for you unless you pay more than they were charging for the chip. This sort of shit is why I try to avoid buying Intel products whenever I can.

So before, you got a massive discount off the top price for buying a crippled chip. Now, you get a massive discount off the top price for buying a crippled chip, and have the option to pay the difference to uncripple it at a later date.

How exactly is this ripping you off? You get what you paid for, same as always, and now have the option to get more if you pay more.

I do not completely agree with Intel here, but my take on the situation is as follows:

Intel knows their market, and sees that there are 10X people willing to pay $Y, 5X people willing to pay $2Y, and 1X people willing to pay $10Y. Each of these groups of people expect to get more than the group under them, but the group under them is not willing to pay more.

Up until now, they've been "binning" chips. If a chip can't pass the speed tests to be worth $10Y, then sell it as $2Y. If it cant' pass those tests, sell it as the cheap chip.

However, what if in this line of chips ALL of the chips start passing the higher speed test? The market will not bear selling all of these chips at $10Y, so they have two options:

-permanently "bin" the chips with some sort of laser cut trace-soft-"bin" the chips

They've chosen the second, and since they have, there's no reason not to allow people to re-upgrade them later.

The summary says they "offered upgrades" not that they are charging for it. And I was able to download the installer without being asked about anything. They seem to be providing a "patch", perhaps they found they could change stuff and make it work better.

But sounds awesome that you think otherwise! Because you'll never try to get it thinking it's going to cost you money!

The software download itself is free, although upon running the tool, it brings up the following message on one of the dialog screens, "During the upgrade process, you will enter the PIN number from the upgrade card you purchased," which suggests that they are charging for it. Sadly, my computer is not upgradeable by this method.

It's like I'm being scammed at purchase, and scammed again at upgrade time.

Out of interest, if you know that $200 will get you a certain set of specifications, you decide those are the specifications you want, you buy it on the expectation that you will get those specifications and when you put it into your computer you find that you do actually get those specifications...

Because clearly, the better specs were so dirt cheap to produce that they were thrown in on speculation, but locked away. Then you get charged real money for something that literally costs the manufacturer nothing.

Most people instinctively feel that to be wrong and often can't say exactly why (it may be part of the hard wired instinct that allows us to behave socially). The more rigorous answer is that in a healthy market, natural competition should have compelled the manufacturer to enable those features at the time of sale in order to be competitive at that price point.

Say that you buy a can with "12 oz" of soda inside. You open it up and drink it. Then you take a look at the can. The can actually holds 16oz. And the manufacturer actually made all 16oz of soda. But to sell a 12oz can, they put 4oz of the soda within a thick plastic resin, thus destroying it for all time. The bottom of your 12oz can is 4oz of wasted plastic graveyard devoted to market segmentation.

They sold you 12 oz of soda, and you got 12 oz of soda. But they ALSO made an extra 4oz of soda. Since you didn't pay for that extra 4oz of soda, they destroyed it rather than letting you or someone else have it.

And yes, that's how the chip industry works. That's also how the car, and certain other industries, works. From the business perspective, it is a way of segmenting your market and supporting tiered pricing options. From an end-consumer standpoint, the company lobotomized something they sold to them, because they aren't the overpaid elite. And whenever they're waiting for an install to complete, or a copy of Outlook to open, they know that bits of their lives are being wasted because a company artificially decided to make the processor in their machine suck 20% more.

It makes perfect business and engineering sense. But that's not how people feel about it. The average person isn't buying a specs sheet. They're buying the fastest processor they can afford. And as it turns out, the processor they bought could be even faster, but some company stopped it for completely artificial reasons. People are going to be frustrated by that.

I think you don't understand what's going on. Intel is giving everyone more options. There's no way this can make you worse off.
You probably don't realize that Intel doesn't make separate "1.8 GHz" and "2.0 GHz" chips. What they do is make many of the same chip, test each chip, and then set the clock frequency depending on how well each chip handles things.
Now imagine many people would rather buy a 1.8GHz chip (it's cheaper and they don't need the extra speed), but the manufacturing process is good and makes mostly 2.0Ghz chips. Intel now has three choices:

Keep things as they are. This makes 1.8GHz chips more expensive (supply is less than demand at the current price), and forces people to buy 2.0GHz chips they don't want.

Lower prices on 2.0GHz chips. This will increase sales, but means giving up on the money of those people who really need (or think they need) the extra speed and are willing to pay for it.

Take some chips that could run at 2.0GHz, mark them "1.8GHz" and sell them for a lower price.

Under the last scenario Intel is happier (they got the money of the people who want cheaper parts and got to charge a premium from the people who want faster parts). The consumers are also happier (they got the processor speed they want at the price they want). Why should the people who wanted 1.8GHz speed care that the part they got could in theory run at 2.0GHz? that's not the speed they wanted in the first place.

To be blunt: You are wrong. Only the "Extreme Edition" and later, K-series chips in the Conroe and Nehalem lines had unlocked multipliers. Similarly, AMD only provides unlocked multipliers on Black Edition and FX-series chips. This has been true at least since the Pentium II/K6-2 line.

The BCLCK is unlocked on Conroe/Nehalem allowing overclocking that way, but it's locked on Sandy Bridge because the processor now provides the clock generator for the whole system. As sort of an "olive branch" to enthus

I honestly don't even give a damn about the money, I am interested just because fuck Intel, fuck them in their stupid asses.

I find I am becoming more and more militant when it comes to bogus moneymaking schemes these tech companies create by eliminating preexisting functionality and charging you extra to give it back to you. Either I'm getting old, or I've been following these trends too closely. Maybe it's time to take up sports fanaticism, or whittling?

You get EXACTLY what you pay for when buying a processor. You get $200 functionality for a $200 processor. Just because a $400 functionality processor came out of the chute, you expect them to give it to you for $200? Or maybe you'd be happier if only $400 models were available? Or if the company was required to actually produce completely separate dies for each version, thus making your $200 model more expensive?

I'd like it if a product's cost was tied to the cost of production plus a reasonable profit margin, you know, something tangible.

By admitting that it costs them exactly the same to make the $200 processor as it does the $400 one (as it must, since they're serving up the exact same product in both cases), they're eliminating any justification for that price at all.

You go ahead and pay whatever arbitrary price they see fit for a product if you want. Me, if I'm buying something, that is now mine, and I'll do

By admitting that it costs them exactly the same to make the $200 processor as it does the $400 one (as it must, since they're serving up the exact same product in both cases)

You only count the raw manufacturing cost of turning a lump of silicon in a working CPU.

This is silly. Most of the cost will be in the design and testing efforts, which are probably higher for the $400 version than for the $200 version, even though the end result is the same piece of silicon.

This is silly. Most of the cost will be in the design and testing efforts, which are probably higher for the $400 version than for the $200 version, even though the end result is the same piece of silicon.

Why would production costs be more? It's the same thing, they're just "turning it down" as it were.

It is physically the exact same processor. There is no extra research being done into how to cheapen it's production, because if there was, the production would be cheaper for the most expensive model, too. The $200 is the actual cost, and the higher prices are inflated because they can. There is absolutely no justification for it outside of "we want more money", and that's fine, but at the same time, I want more processor than I paid for. Guess we're at an impasse then; they lock a good processor down to make me spend more money on the same thing, I hack the functionality back in because there's no real reason it isn't there to begin with. I don't lose very much sleep for doing this; we've already been paying far too much under ridiculous artificial scarcity models as it is.

You can't escape this though, otherwise they wouldn't do it. AMD does the same except without the software unlock. Price discrimination like this only works if competition is bad -- which it is, because there are only 2 manufacturers of PC chips right now (plus a few others with small slices of the market). Entering the x86 market is extremely expensive, so this sorry state of affairs is unlikely to change.

But even if you buy Intel, install a cracked upgrade and don't pay them any money, you're STILL endorsing the practice by using their chips in the first place. If you really want to stick it to them, then you'll stop buying and supporting their products altogether.

Virtually all instances of this program are tied to vendors you see commonly in Best Buy and the like. Mostly it is targeted at people who wouldn't dare overclock themselves or run non-Windows systems.

I imagine that by virtue of installing Linux on any of the systems in question, or dabbling with various overclocking tools, you could trivially enable the "features" being sold here. It makes sense, especially if it's tied to the motherboard.

According to the FAQ, if you replace your motherboard, the upgrade is no longer valid on the chip. It must store the information in the BIOS or at least use an identifier from the BIOS.

They're probably grabbing a unique identifier from the motherboard or BIOS/EFI and storing it in non-volitale RAM on the chip. When you run the 'upgrade' it probably just updates the bits for the clock multiplier. By storing a unique (and probably encrypted) value tied to the board it will make it harder for someone to figure come up with a crack.

I know I shouldn't be RTFA but I couldn't read it. Slashdotted already?

I just wanted to know if these "upgrades" is done by changing the micro-codes. Or are there some FPGAs in the chips? Just curious, very obviously I'm not a chip designer!

Also, does this mean that someone (who REALLY knows what they're doing), could upgrade a "cheap" chip into something more expensive? Or add new features/try new designs or instructions? Isn't there some "hardware" encoded security aspects to these chips that might become vulnerable (like DRM)?

There is no article. The only link on the summary is a link to the upgrade page, where you can download an upgrade for Windows. I wasn't even asked anything, just downloaded the file. If you have one of the processors from the list, perhaps you can try it. I didn't see they were charging for it.

To me, they probably found that these can run faster without blowing them and they are providing you with the option. Of course, I assume also, this will also increase the power consumption.

and Ford, they're going to sell you a car, and you can purchase an upgrade on your fuel economy, cooler air from the air conditioning, and enable the side-curtain airbags and heated seats too, for an additional fee, all as software upgrades.

The issue here is the manufacturers are starting to realize just how much overhead they're spending making so many different models of products, and that it's cheaper to just manufacture one model, the best one, and then cripple it if you don't want to pay for the best.

You could damage it (don't want the run-flat bladdered tires? they'll just shank the bladders with an ice pick near the end of the assembly line) or by disabling it via software. It's only natural to expect buyers to look for ways to re-enable disabled features. And we've seen so many times how manufacturers like to think they still somehow can tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use the product you purchased from them. (they want to sell it to you, but not really sell, as in, it's your property to do with as you please) God I hate that.

I'm really quite surprised that by now we're not seeing manufacturers trying to license physical goods. So you buy a computer. But you didn't really buy it, you licensed the use and Dell still owns it and is just loaning it to you, and can legally tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use it. (or cancel your license for any reason at any time, and demand you return it)

But closer to back on topic, so what's the going wager on whether they'll play the ever-popular DMCA card (for circumventing a protection device) if these get hacked back to top specs? I'm betting near 100%.

And we've seen so many times how manufacturers like to think they still somehow can tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use the product you purchased from them. (they want to sell it to you, but not really sell, as in, it's your property to do with as you please) God I hate that.

The issue here is the manufacturers are starting to realize just how much overhead they're spending making so many different models of products, and that it's cheaper to just manufacture one model, the best one, and then cripple it if you don't want to pay for the best.

What's the issue here? You think everyone should be forced to buy the top-end model because that's the only one manufacturers should make available? If you by a $20,000 car, you get $20,000 functionality. Just cause there's $50,000 functional

This hypothetical CPU in question already has the ability to run at 3 GHz, but is artificially restricted from doing so in order to create a tiered market in order to suck more money from consumers in order to make the manufacturer richer. The extra money charged to enable the 3 GHz speed is nothing but gravy, because the CPU costs the same to manufacture whether the 3 GHz speed is enabled or not. No--in fact, it costs more to manufacture with the "security features". If th

AT&T used to do that with telephones, and most cable companies still do it with set-top boxes used to decode digital cable signals (but not/really/, honest, you can buy a DVC from another company and use it. Maybe. If we let you.)

There are laws in the USA that prevent many companies from requiring rental (what "licensing" a physical product actually is) of their own equipment in order to access services, but so far as I know none that prevent companies from renting products that are not actually tied t

Intel has been doing this for years, they just haven't monetized it until recently.

Working for a company that built custom motherboards around intel chips, we had access to intel white and yellow manuals (I think there is red and black above that). The tech manuals explains various registers on the CPU and what they do. The better the manual, the more information you get about the CPU.

It's fun to spend a couple weeks trying to figure out a CPU bug that you keep hitting while trying to boot. Then on a call

FPGA is logic gates, the building blocks of CPUs (and other computing chips) that can be interconnected on demand to create different logic circuits - and therefore custom instructions. Logic implemented in FPGA on a CPU can be revised by over-the-network software upgrades. FPGA was typically used by chip designers to develop candidate designs to be burned into hardware, but has become cheap and fast enough to distribute as end-product "reconfigurable computing" devices.

Imagine your multimedia codecs configured directly into logic circuits on the CPU. They'd be really fast, and lower power than moving data across the CPU/RAM/bus boundaries. Upgrades by SW, just like now. Load/unload them as circuits on demand rather than as instruction codes in banks of RAM. Bring the network wires to FPGA pins on the CPU, and the data can route to codec processors on the chip for parallel operation. Of course these features apply to any "media" data, including business data in streams or large datasets.

Intel's move to SW upgrades of CPU microcode is creating the tech and business infrastructure for regular FPGA upgrades to these new hybrids. Soon enough the literally hardwired CPU logic might become the minority of the chip. Already FPGAs with embedded DSPs [wikipedia.org] are like that, so a chip that's mostly FPGA with just some ALU and CLU circuits already optimized to close to their theoretical performance (in speed or power) are foreseeable.

FPGAs are very transistor-inefficient and thus are very expensive and power hungry. To give you an example, programming an ARM Cortex A8 into an FPGA requires a multi-thousand dollar FPGA and takes double or triple digits of Watts of power. While a regular ASIC one costs less than $20 and takes a Watt or so. Also the FPGA one runs at perhaps 50MHz and the ASIC one runs at 1GHz.

Intel's reason for the FPGA is because they don't license their IP, the only way to integrate your logic with theirs without multiple chips is to use this. But that's a weak solution. With ARM you can license their IP and integrate it yourself in an ASIC, you'd be a fool to use an FPGA in a large-scale deployment, you're just throwing money away. In short-run deployments FPGAs make a ton of sense.

Use of FPGAs with DSPs is more common, programmable analog/digital logic can be very useful, like Cypress' PSOC (8051 based though, not ARM). I believe most cable/DSL modems use DSPs.

That's why Xilinx added a 500MHz FPGA tightly integrated as a bus peripheral of a multicore ARM-C9. The Zynq-7000 will cost somewhere between $20 and $50, depending on the model (and amount of FPGA).

Both the Atom and Zynq FPGA versions are about to make FPGA as mass market (embedded, in cars and industrial control, then in multimedia workstations) as DSPs have become. Every PC has multiple DSPs, at least in soundcards and often in video systems and sometimes in network interfaces; hard drives often have the

When I got the new laptop it didn't seem as responsive as I thought it should be. Maybe I was right. They gave me a crippled CPU that I need to unlock the performance on? "Increasing the cache" sounds like a totally bogus upgrade btw. I'm going to be pretty pissed knowing that the full cache wasn't being used on the machine I bought.

I think I'm going to pick up their new Bulldozer when it comes out. Intel makes great processors but these shenanigans have got to stop.

What shenanigans?

Except for the CPUs at the very top of their respective product lines, ALL processors are crippled. Compared to the i7, the i3 is just a permanently gimped chip. But its wasteful, both from a manufacturing perspective and from a user perspective, to make physically different chips. It's more efficient to make the low end chip upgradable through software. Fewer physical chip lines result in lower manufacturing costs which can then be passed on to the consumer or shareholder. It also results in lower upgrade costs for the end user, who doesn't have to actually pay for the shipping, delivery, and installation of a new chip. So this is a win-win. Except for people who think all software should be free and therefore feel ripped off at having to pay for additional functionality. I mean, any piece of software, even say Photoshop or Crysis2, is just "unlocking" the capability that your computer already in principle possesses. Why should you have to pay for that, amirite?

This has been going on for quite sometime in enterprise world, well sort of. Although not quite the same, Citrix's NetScaler box can be "upgraded" via license purchase. This usually increases throughput and the number of allowed SSL sessions. IBM also sells their P-series server in quite similar manner. They will ship the box with all sockets filled with processors, but only enable the ones that you purchase. If you require additional processors, you will have to pay IBM to enable more processor.
In the end, you still get what your money worth. I never consider an overclockability as a feature, I treat it more like a bonus. And if Intel or AMD decides to stop giving bonus, that's fine for me

It seems they want to build in a revenue stream so I wonder if they will be rolling out additional upgrades. So you buy this upgrade now, but in 3 months there will be an additional upgrade to increase performance another 10%.

It's like the DLC for games model. Buy the game. A few months later buy the DLC. A few months after that buy DLC #2, etc...

IBM's been doing this sort of thing with their mainframes, probably at least 20 years. You order a specified amount of hardware and they ship you more with most of it disabled. If you decide you want more, you give them a large briefcase full of cash and they turn some more on for you. It's actually cheaper than sending techs out, and easier than replacing your mainframe or disk array every few years. They can also do you temporary extra processing power in the lead-up to tax day or for year-end financial p

Back in the early 80's I was in charge of writing image processing (picture and movie) software using Data General minis to talk to the gamma cameras (this was in the Nuclear Medicine department of a famous American heart hospital). The Data Generals talked to a Perkin-Elmer mainframe (via HyperChannel) which was the machine on which most of my programs were run.

We ordered a processor upgrade from PE. A couple of days later, the tech from

Yup, back in the mid-80s I worked for a firm that wrote EPoS software for petrol filling stations (gas stations). There was a whole extra feature set that could be enabled simply by programming a special character (might just have been an "@" sign, I forget) into one of the programmable setup fields, and we charged quite a bit for it.

Our field-service engineers got so embarrassed at this (as did those of us in the software department with a conscience), that if time allowed they'd often open the box up and pretend to fiddle inside, maybe faking an EPROM change, to do it.

Eventually one or two site managers got wise, and the word spread as to what the secret was, and everyone was getting it for free, so we had to make it so it really WAS an EPROM change...

It usually suggests that competitive pressures on the seller, at least in that segment, are sufficiently low that they derive greater benefit from improved price discrimination than they do harm from making their prices less competitive. Given their fab prowess vs. AMD, it isn't totally surprising that Intel sees themselves doing better by voluntarily cutting the value of low end parts, rather than letting higher-end buyers get away with paying less.

(Secondarily, and specific to this particular instance, it probably doesn't hurt that consumer PCs frequently get crufted up and 'slow' over their lifetime and Joe User has no idea why. It's rarely the processor's fault, so what Intel is selling won't help them; but "make your computer faster!" is a well established product line, and Intel's offering won't technically be a lie...)

Some people are willing to shell out more money for a faster processor, while other people are not. It costs more to produce genuinely different CPU's than to just cripple one CPU, so the idea is that they make a large profit from the people who will pay for the faster CPU, and a lower profit from those who won't.

Well maybe the employees that work for Intel can decide that if they're not getting wages that seem fair in proportion to what managers are getting, they can just move a little slower. No need to have different employees, they can just adjust their productivity to match the price. How efficient that would be. Management has already set a precedent, so they shouldn't have any ground to complain, right?

Burger stands could just use some slightly foul dressing to offer lower priced options without having to cook differently otherwise. I wonder if Intel is violating some prior art, like spit in the soup for customers that don't tip well?

If chips have a back-door to control one feature, what else is in there? Can they be really secure if they've got hidden controls or debug modes? People were upset when Intel was going to digitally serialize their chips. Whatever happened with that? Of course if chips can be uniquely upgraded it seems we know.

I hope Intel products get more serious competition. Also, the fuss about power consumption should be just for laptops. Feel the top of a recent iMac sometime. Hopefully Steve pressuring them will help. Did Intel ever come up with some answer to small geometry leakage currents besides lowering the voltage? Shutting down sections helped too, but a process that isn't prone to the problem is needed. The Core series was a huge leap from the Pentium 4, but it doesn't really seem like we've seen that much since considering how long it has been. It could be worse. At least CPUs aren't licensed by the year, waiting to expire after some freshness date. (the way it feels with Apple expiring old apps by omitting Rosetta in Lion)

Exactly and Intel as in TFA has a history of "pre crippling" the hardware you buy from them. it was a real PITA for me when XP Mode first came out as it was hell trying to tell which Intel chips supported virtualization and which didn't.

This is one of the reasons I recommend folks switch to AMD. with the AMD chips ALL the features are supported by ALL the CPUs, even the newer Semprons have virtualization and with most of the new boards you can take your chances and see if the dual you got is a triple or qua

I'm pretty sure that there is not as much variation in the speed of processors coming out of a fab plant as there is in the size of eggs that hens lay.

Having worked for a major chip company, I can tell you that your assumption here is incorrect. There really is that much variation in chips coming off the assembly line. In fact, I'd wager that the variation in chips coming off the fab is more varied than the size of chicken eggs.

It's the side effect of pushing higher and higher density within the chip. Modern equipment could probably push out extremely consistent 90nm designs. But 90nm chips were out of date 5 years ago. In order to be competitive, you have to push the most density out of the equipment you have. And that means that you get significant variation in your product, even within one wafer. The companies build in flexibility to the chip to allow for this variation. There are "fuses" built in to each chip specifically to disable the broken parts of the chip. If the L3 cache on a processor is totally hosed, they will blow the fuses for it and completely turn it off. But since the rest of the chip is fine they can still sell it, albeit at a discount. Even the maximum speed can be fused into the chip. The testing procedures ramp up voltage and clock frequency until the chip starts failing. Then they step it down a notch or two and fuse it there.

AMD has never produced a 45nm dual or triple core design. I'm not sure they even made one in 65nm. The x2 and x3 processors are just x4 (or x6?) chips with one or more dead cores and maybe less cache, depending on the specific chip. Intel does the exact same thing with their core series processors. That's just the way processor companies do business. It's been that way for decades.

Except with CPUs it would be impractical to test every "location" on the wafer, so they have to make a map of which "chickens" will always make bigger eggs and which don't. That's where over clocking comes in because you might get one of the "smaller" chickens that only made Jumbo eggs 75% of the time so they had to exclude that spot. They also have daily shipments they need to make so they might need to fill some cartons with bigger eggs than on the label.

That is called binning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning [wikipedia.org]It is standard industry practice. Doing so saves *you* money because it gives customers the option to buy underperforming or semi-functional yields at a lower cost. It is good for the environment because it reduces manufacturing waste. Higher sellable yields improves profits for manufacturers and reduce costs for you. It is a win-win situation!

Intel has been doing that forever, from the 486SX, which just had a broken FPU

Some people here on Slashdot seem really upset about this software upgrade thing. But I was upset about the 487SX, and I still grimace when I think about it.

Before the 486, you had the 386 CPU chip, and the 387 FPU chip. A 386 motherboard would have a second socket for the FPU; probably the socket was empty when you bought a 386 system, but you could buy a 387 for a speed boost.

The 486 was the first Intel CPU with an integrated FPU. So, the 486SX was a way for Intel to sell a cheaper part, and to sell 486 chips whose FPU was defective. I get that. I'm cool with that.

The real 486 was called the "486DX". SX == no FPU, DX == FPU.

The 486SX and the 486DX were pin-compatible. If you wanted to upgrade a 486SX system, you could simply pull the 486SX out and pop in a 486DX.

But Intel tried to push a motherboard design where there were two sockets: the 486SX socket, and the 487SX socket. Instead of unplugging the 486SX and putting in a 486DX, you were supposed to leave the 486SX in place, and buy a 487SX, which was just a 486DX with an incompatible pinout (including one extra pin). You couldn't put a 487SX in a 486DX socket. When you put in a 487SX, the motherboard would disable the 486SX and it would just sit there, with the 487SX doing all the work, as it really was just a 486DX. (And an integrated FPU sharing cache with the rest of the CPU is better for performance.)

I found the whole 486SX/487SX thing to be breathtakingly obnoxious. It's one thing to provide multiple price points and find a way to sell CPUs with a defective FPU. It's quite another thing to engineer up a whole system that was cynically designed to lock up a perfectly good 486SX chip and trick a user into buying a special 487SX chip instead of just getting a 486 as an upgrade.

To make it even stupider, the 487SX cost more than a 486, because the 486 was being mass-produced. I found a Google Books scanned copy of InfoWorld [google.com] that said the 487SX was 30% more expensive than an equivalent 486 chip! ($799 vs. $588 for a 25 MHz part) And a 25 MHz 486SX must have cost $258 because the cost of leaving the 486SX in place and adding a 487SX was $1057, vs. $588 for the 25 MHz 486DX plus having a spare 486SX you could sell or give away.

Nobody I knew ever bought a 487SX, and I don't think many companies even built computers with a 487SX socket. Even Intel can't push that kind of cynical "solution" and have wide success with it.

Because it costs the same amount of money to make a fast chip or a slow one. But many people wont pay more than $xx for a cpu at a specific performance level.

This sort of thing has gone on in the electronics and computer business for 50 years. Back in the 60's and for several decades IBM offered a single printer that could print at three different speeds at three different monthly lease points. The only difference between them was a rubber belt. You'd ask for the upgrade, IBM would raise your lease fee, and a guy would show up to change the belt.

While some chips get binned lower due to inability to run at a certain speed or having a bad core, most are simply made to run slower at a lower price point.

What really is the alternative? Would you like the chip companies to have separate manufacturing process for each speed level, causing an overall increase in cost across the line? Just charge everyone the top cost and give them all the fastest chip?

I think its a cool thing that you can buy an inexpensive computer, pay a small fee, and have it go faster rather than buy a new computer. Why someone would work overtime to find an issue with this is preposterous...

Which features that were listed in the product spec when you bought the chip did you not get? I can see that as a problem along the lines of fraud. But specs that were not disclosed? You never paid for them. Since you picked that particular model, it seems you didn't even want them.

No, it's like saying some consumers demand automobiles that will only go 150mph when they could go 300mph. Some people actually care about top speed. Some don't, at all. Some do, but care more about money. Welcome to the world of market segmentation.

The consumers aren't demanding a low-end CPU per se, they are demanding a cheap CPU. Others are demanding a faster CPU and are willing to pay. It's not just two groups either, it's a gradient.

No business sells a product at some fixed profit margin above the cost to manufacture. What companies do is they first determine their the lowest price they'd be willing to accept, their WTA, for a product. Due to economics of scale, the WTA goes down as the number of goods sold goes up. Imagine a graph where the x-axis is the number of units sold, and the y-axis is the lowest price they'd be willing to accept for that number of sales.

because with IBM the machine is purchased under a contract with IBM. In the Desktop computing world, CPUs are a "thing" a resource in a box with a 1 year defect warranty. Intel has no "rights" to what the chip in my machine does only that I don't violate their copyright by reverse engineering it. IBM machines come with thick books guaranteeing CPU, uptimes, power consumption, etc. as well as warranties and service contracts for not meeting any of those specifications.

I don't want the only processor option to be the $500 top of the line model. I'm willing to pay $100 or $200 for a processor with that level of functionality. If you want $500 functionality, buy the $500 product. The manufacturing process facilitates the design of a single chip that's latter modified to create a performance level matching its price.

Have you looked at the power-to-price curve of AMD and Intel? AMD beats Intel so thoroughly on the performance/price curve that I wonder why anyone bothers with Intel. The only part where Intel wins is the performance of high-end CPUs, but that's only because they pack more effective cores into one unit. Performance of single-threaded programs is roughly equal, so Intel can't claim an edge there as well.

You can care about performance of either single-threaded or multi-threaded programs. In the former case, AMD wins thanks to lower price, in the latter, it still wins as you can pile more CPUs and still get it cheaper. The only case when choosing Intel might be a rational choice is the sudden jump between prices of 1-CPU and 2-CPU systems if your needs are just above the top performance of best AMDs but below the point Intel would need two CPUs as well.

Intel's advertising tries to compare CPUs with different prices. To get a meaningful comparison, you need to compare performance with a fixed price or prices with a fixed performance.

How us it wrong if, to use your analogy, the computer was clearly labelled as bring only able go address 3 gigabytes of memory? It would be sn entirely different matter if they had sold the machine as having 4 gigs, while neglecting to mention that an additional payment is required to get the last gig.

This Intel thing doesn't trouble. If I buy a 2.67 processor, and it runs at the advertised clock rate the I have what I paid paid for. The fact that the chip can go faster is immaterial.

lol... and you really think that tri-core Phenom isn't just a quad-core with a non-functioning or disabled core? You pay tri-core prices for tri-core functionality. You're not getting screwed in either scenario here (well... with regards to enabled/disabled features).

Well.. I bought this 4-door car (its all they sell) but only the front 2 doors open. I can buy the upgrade package which they will send via OnStar which will unlock the back two doors, but its another $5k. If I change/modify the motor the back doors wont work any more.

Close, but it's more like you bought a two-door car that also had two unusable doors, then paid more to get all four working. You could have paid for the four-door version from the get-go but only needed two at the time and wanted to save some money. There's a subtle difference.

Some, including me, would argue there is value in increasing the longevity of a hardware platform by offering later upgrades. If you needed a 3GHz CPU why did you only buy a 2GHz CPU? I think what really pisses people off is that the